The central Biblical strategy for coming out of darkness and discouragement and doubt is a conscious effort of the mind. Notice these strong words of intentionality (even stronger in the Hebrew with the second verb in each pair a cohortative):"I shall remember... Surely I will remember" (verse 11); "I will meditate... and [I will] muse" (verse 12). These are conscious acts that he chooses to do. This is the fight of faith. This is the fight for delight. This is the opposite of passivity and resignation. This is a strategy of life.
All of us have said (or ought to have said) from time to time:"I know God in my head, but I don't feel him in my heart. My knowledge is not rescuing me the way it did the Psalmist. "I don't want to minimize physical and traumatic(บาดแผล)obstacles (อุปสรรค), but I do want to raise this question- mainly for myself, but for you too:When we say that we know facts about God in our head, but they are not making their way down into our emotions and making any difference the way they seem to for the psalmist, what do we mean by" knowing facts about God "?
Do we mean what the psalmist does by" remembering "and" meditating "and" musing "? I Do we mean what the psalmist does by "remembering" and "meditating" and "musing"? I wonder. Take an example. Suppose you are feeling unworthy and unacceptable to God and generally a failure and having little motivation to rise above the sense of despondency. Now, you have lots of knowledge in your head of Christ's great deeds of old. And if someone says to you, "But don't you know that you are justified by faith and God looks on you in Christ as you cast yourself on him for mercy?" you might say, "Yes, I know that in my head, but it isn't having any effect on my feelings."
But is that passive knowing about- or that awareness of- justification what the psalmist means by "remember, meditate, muse "? Could it be that he means something like this? I will call to mind that my Lord Jesus- the kindest, most loving, and utterly sinless man- on a day in history hung on a Roman cross of torture and execution in horrible pain next to a man who had lived a life of sin all his life and was on the brink of eternal dam nation. I will remember the sufferings of what he experienced that day and let them brew in my mind. I will remember that the thief next to him said, for some wonderful and inexplicable reason (for he was cursing at first)," Jesus, remember me when You come in Your kingdom! "(Luke 23:42). I will meditate on the grace of God that brought that change of heart. I will muse on how unlikely that was and how hopeless that request was. I will talk to myself about how this man had no time to become good and deserving before he died. I will think about what kind of grace he thought might be available from this dying Christ.
Then I will remember- I will consciously pursue the memory, I will call it up from my memory or I will track it down in the Gospel of Luke- that Jesus said to the thief, "Truly I say to you, today you shall be with Me in Paradise" (Luke 23:43). And I will pause here and muse on this answer a long time. I will not hurry off somewhere to say that such knowledge has no effect on my emotions. I will pause. I will linger and muse and meditate on this. This is a wonder. Here is a dying man declaring a life- long thief accepted and loved and heaven- bound. Here is a grace that sweeps a lifetime of guilt away in an instant. Here is a power that says death can hold neither you nor me. Here is an authority that decides who goes to heaven and who doesn't. Here is an immediacy that says it will happen this very day. No purgatory, no testing, no penance. Just absolute forgiveness and acquittal and cleansing and acceptance. "Your way, O God, is holy; What god is great like our God? You are the God who works wonders" (Psalm 77:13).
How many of us have fought for the joy of faith like that when we complain that we know the facts of God but they hare not having any effect on our feelings?